OC Revisited

May 19th, 2007, 17:44

OK, after building a new PC (with fairly high-grade parts), and patching the game up with the latest updates, I'm revisiting the NWN2 OC. So far, I'm pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable the experience has been.

First off, I haven't experienced a single crash or bug after about 10 hours of play. Given that my first foray was plagued by weird slow-downs, crashes, and some not-so-professional quest issues, I'd say they've patched things up nicely.

Second, being able to play this game with the look that was intended, including cranking up shadows, water reflections, and resolution, has made the game fairly pleasing to the eye. Also, I'm able to move around in the world with nary a slow-down. Granted, my new PC falls squarely in the "mid to high-end" category, but I suspect this will be the new standard for the store-bought PC through the remainder of this year.

So, as was said when the game came out, they should've held onto it until 1) they resolved the crashing, slow-down issues, and rampant bugs, and 2) the standard store-bought system was able to play it at a decent resolution and with most graphical effects activated.

Now, none of the above excuses the linear approach of the OC and the often bland, generic storytelling. But, it has made me see many of the positives of this engine and has me looking forward to more mods that utilize the tools at hand.

—Lord Alex

P.S. Playing a Rogue/Sorcerer/Arcane Trickster makes for a pretty enjoyable experience, that lends itself well to the game's emphasis on speaking skills, trap detection, and room-clearing magic. Playing the game on "D&D Core Rules" setting, I'm finding the combat difficulty easy but enjoyable.

Lord Alex

My own game experience didn't support a great need for a high-end PC, nor show any game-breaking problems on my two year old XP M 2600 PC with its X800 XT-PE VPU and single GB of RAM (using Win2K rather than XP may be part of this). Admittedly, the launcher's estimate of medium-high settings for everything did leave plenty of room to push settings to higher numbers if I needed to verify what the launcher gave to me.

I'm currently only up to patch 1.04, and holding, and have had better performance with each of the two most recent patches I've applied, but in each case it's been a relatively incremental improvement, nothing huge. I've suggested all along that too many gamers needed a fresh OS install, and to run with very limited background activity.

Originally Posted by Kiwi
My own game experience didn't support a great need for a high-end PC

Yes, you were one of the lucky ones. The game was actually playable on a variety of systems, but almost completely unplayable on others. And, in my case, the game WAS installed on a clean build, with defragged HD and nothing major running in the background.